The Illustrated Life and Career of William Palmer

By Bill Peschel

THE PRINCE OF POISONERS

William Palmer was known to all in Rugeley. The son from a wealthy family had trained in London as a surgeon and returned to the English village with his beautiful, respected wife to raise a family and live out his days as a country doctor.

But Dr. Palmer wanted more. More money. More excitement. More women. He dove into the shady world of horse racing, gambling heavily and spending a fortune to build his stable of thoroughbreds. When money grew tight, he found that a dosed drink or two could clear the way. He got away with it, poisoning his wife, mother-in-law, his infant children, fellow gamblers and many more, until he killed one time too many.

The story of Dr. Palmer’s deadly treatments at the birth of the mass media riveted the nation and spread around the world. The sensational 12-day trial in London’s Old Bailey drew the attention of royalty (Prince Albert bought one of Palmer’s horses at auction) and literature (Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins followed the case) and made legal history as the first trial in which strychnine figured and the first to be moved because of the enormous publicity.

Appearing soon after Palmer’s execution in 1856, “The Illustrated Life and Career of William Palmer” was published to cash in on the notorious case. The anonymous author combined facts and rumors about Palmer’s crimes with sketches on debauched medical students and crooked scams in horse racing, and pious meditations on Palmer’s wife. With the help of footnotes and essays, the result is a compelling, fascinating look at life in the early Victorian era, and the criminal doctor who was placed “at the head of his profession” by none other than Sherlock Holmes!

Look for these other Peschel Press books on the Palmer case: “The Illustrated Times Trial of William Palmer” and “The Life and Career of Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peschel Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311496065

Bill Peschel

Bill Peschel is a recovering journalist who shares a Pulitzer Prize with the staff of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. He also is mystery fan who has run the Wimsey Annotations at www.planetpeschel.com for nearly two decades. He is the author of the 223B series of Sherlock Holmes parodies and pastiches, "The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair at Styles," "The Complete, Annotated Secret Adversary" and "The Complete, Annotated Whose Body?" as well as "Writers Gone Wild" (Penguin Books). He lives in Hershey, where the air really does smell like chocolate.

Book preview

Introduction.

When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession.

Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Speckled Band

Look at the scores and scores of murders that have gone unproved and unsuspected till the fool of a murderer went too far and did something silly which blew up the whole show. Palmer, for instance. His wife and brother and mother-in-law and various illegitimate children, all peacefully put away—till he made the mistake of polishing Cook off in that spectacular manner.

Lord Peter Wimsey, Unnatural Poison

It was inevitable that the good doctor and I would meet. He appears at the intersection of several of my long-standing interests: history, the Victorian era, true crime, Sherlock Holmes, and Lord Peter Wimsey. I just didn’t think it would be as his publisher.

I founded Peschel Press in 2010 with the intention of publishing my fiction. But inspiration intervened, as well as the lack of a suitable manuscript. I needed something to sell. I had been annotating the Wimsey stories at my website (www.planetpeschel.com). When I turned to Sayers’ first novel, Whose Body?, I discovered that a quirk in the copyright law left the book in the public domain in the U.S. I decided to publish it as a book. Going through the process from editing to proofing would let me hone my skills in the practical side of book-making as well as make a little money.

Palmer appeared only as one of Sayers’ few footnotes in Whose Body? Lord Peter Wimsey and his friend, police inspector Parker, were discussing whether a suspect’s decades-long jealousy was a strong enough motive for murder. Parker thought not, laconically calling it—Very old—and not much of a motive. Wimsey replied:

People have been known to do that sort of thing.

The footnote to this consisted of a long quotation from Lord Chief Justice Campbell’s summing-up of the evidence in Regina vs. Palmer. Being a dutiful researcher, I read up on the case and footnoted the footnote. Being an aficionado of Victorian true crime, I also wrote a short essay for the back of the book describing the case in more detail.

That’s when I learned that the Palmer case was the Crime of the Century, or at least the Crime of Mid-Century Britain. News of his arrest, with intimations that he had also done in his wife, mother-in-law, several children, and his fellow gamblers, created a sensation. The trial at London’s Old Bailey (which itself was unprecedented, requiring an act of Parliament to move it from Staffordshire) lasted for 12 days, at a time when even murder trials lasted for one.

The trial was also notable for the introduction of the expert witness. Not much was known about poisons and how they acted on the body. A test was developed for strychnine, but no one was certain if it could be found after it was absorbed into the body. The only way to find out what worked and what didn’t was for researchers to poison animals—rabbits, dogs, and cats in particular—and see what happened, both outside and inside the body. The result was a lot of discussion in the press and medical journals about, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, the known-knowns, the known-unknowns, and the unknown-unknowns of poisons.

All this was a consequence of advances made possible by the Industrial Revolution, when a host of inventions swept Britain, causing massive disruptions everywhere. Changes in manufacturing and transportation made drugs more readily available on the open market. Arsenic, prussic acid, and strychnine were sold over the counter. A reduction in the paper tax and advances in presses dropped the price of newspapers and magazines to the point where everyone could afford one. Universal schooling created a generation of readers, and publishers raced to give them what they enjoyed.

What people wanted to read about most, it seems, was crime. It was a popular genre during the Victorian era. The stories of burglars, highwaymen, and cutthroats followed a familiar path that always led to their hanging, complete with their last confession, followed by a moralistic plea not to follow them.

The most popular crime was murder by poison, which struck at the heart of Victorian concerns. It was a personal act inflicted by a family member, relative, or friend on the innocent and involved a betrayal of trust. It took place in the home, that sanctum sanctorum of Victorian life. Frequently, it was motivated by sexual desire or the consequences of it. One of the more notorious cases, for example, was that of a genteel Scotswoman, Madeleine Smith, who at 21 poisoned her ex-lover when he threatened to send her love letters to her family.

(There were two elements to this case that added a thrilling frisson to Victorian newspaper readers: the victim was a dastardly Frenchman—which appealed to British xenophobia—and that the jury returned a verdict of not proven—a decision unique to Scotland that meant we think ye did it, lassie, but the evidence didna prove it.)

Many cases never moved off the newspaper page, and it was left to later writers to reconstruct them. Palmer, however, had inspired three books that I wanted to see back in print: this one, the Times’ edition of the trial transcript, and Dr. George Fletcher’s The Life and Career of Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley.

Dr. Fletcher’s book was published in 1925. It went through one edition and then fell out of print. This was a pity, because he had a personal interest in Palmer that’s reflected in his writing. Like Palmer, he was born in the county of Staffordshire and even knew many of the people involved in the case, including John Parsons Cook:

My earliest recollections begin with Cook coming to Bromsgrove (where my father practised as a doctor), when I was a schoolboy, and I carried his cricket-bag to the ground in the summer of 1855. And I remember my father strongly upbraiding him, a fine young man about twenty-seven years of age, telling him he was wasting his substance and his health in riotous living, racing, and general dissipation, adding, ‘Even now you are on your way to Worcester Races with a set of blacklegs and idlers, the worst of whom is that dissolute Dr. Palmer, who will rob you again and again’; and mother chimed in with a lot more to the same effect.

This memory and the aftermath inspired Fletcher to explore the case. He visited Rugeley several times and spoke to anyone who knew anything about the case. Late in his life, his friends encouraged him to publish what he had learned. His Life and Career follows the familiar story, but it’s told from a personal perspective.

As for the trial transcript, there were several good candidates, including the official record available online at the Old Bailey website. But the Times version was accompanied by a wealth of woodcuts specially produced for the newspaper. Making woodcuts was an expensive, time-consuming process, and publishers rarely created them only for books. You’ll see that in the Illustrated Life; many were clearly made for previous books, and the thrifty publisher reused a few for The Yelverton Marriage Case (1861).

But the Times had covered the trial; their artist had already created the illustrations for the newspaper, so reusing them for the book was not only cost-effective, but gave the reader something they wouldn’t find in other books: a window into Palmer’s world and its inhabitants. Reading Elizabeth Mills’ testimony about Cook’s agonies as he slowly, fearfully died from strychnine is riveting. Seeing her as the courtroom artist saw her resurrects her. She stands in the dock in her best dress, bonnet tied firmly in place, gripping a book (the Bible she swore an oath on?) and pointing (to Palmer, who from her elevated position she could see across the courtroom?).

Her sallow, thin face hints at a lifetime of physical labor. She could have stepped from the pages of Dickens. Considering that what she saw in that candlelit room rivaled Bill Sykes’ murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist for sheer terror, she might as well have.

Admittedly, The Times Report of the Trial of William Palmer can be a slog. All trials are inherently dull, and even with a man’s life in the balance, Palmer’s was no exception. After the prosecution witnesses described the events leading up to the murder and Palmer’s behavior, the defense relied solely on a parade of medical experts of varying quality arguing that Cook died from anything, seemingly everything, instead of from poison. Was it apoplexy? Was it syphilis? Was it something in his spine? The only fun comes from seeing Jeremiah Smith, Palmer’s longtime friend and co-conspirator, squirming on the stand, trying to explain why he spent so many nights at the home of Mrs. Palmer (his mother, then in her 60s) rather than walking home to his bachelor bed. One wonders why the defense didn’t object to this line of questioning, but one doesn’t object.

After that, there was the judge’s day-long summing up of the evidence—old Campbell wanted to see Palmer swing and didn’t he make every effort to hint that to the jury!—and then the Attorney-General got his turn. By law, the defense was obliged to remain silent, so we can forgive Palmer’s note to his attorney that he’d like to give the judge a dose of strychnine. I would have, too.

Compared to the length and complexity of editing the Times book, working on The Illustrated Life was sheer fun. It was an instant book published quickly after Palmer’s hanging. The story was efficiently told, without the curlicues and digressions common to Victorian fiction, and the sidelights into horse racing, the education of medical students, and London nightlife are detailed and knowing.

With Palmer dead, they could throw in everything they heard about him, but the book doesn’t read as a collection of fictions. Exaggerations, surely; one can’t see Palmer as a lusty, drunken medical student and the later country doctor with his soft-soap manners and phlegmatic temperament. But the book conveys what it was like to live in those times, where a country lad in Rugeley could be awed by the delights of London, accurately described by Dr. Watson as that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained!

Accompanied by Stephen Bates’ The Poisoner (2014) as a chaser, the Rugeley Poisoner series covers every aspect of the Palmer case, with revealing details about the discreet pleasures and passions of the mid-Victorian-era gentleman. And when you’re done, maybe you’ll understand the countryside as Sherlock Holmes did in The Copper Beeches, as a place that hides deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

Bill Peschel

Hershey, Pa.

March 24, 2016

How This Book Was Edited.

The text was taken from Google Books, which scanned a printed copy using optical-character recognition and converted it into text. The quality was scattershot, as anyone who has bought a printed copy of the PDF file will see. So the manuscript was read four times, twice on the computer screen and twice in the printed version by myself and a copy editor. Problem areas were identified and corrected after comparison to the PDF.

That was the easy part. We had to decide how faithful this edition should be to the first edition. Should we recreate the book or should it be improved, and if so, how far? Should we ignore factual errors, footnote them or silently correct them? Should the illustrations be kept in their original locations, even when they’re clearly out of place? How far should we go to make the book useful to modern readers without losing the flavor of how the language was used at the time?

To find an answer, we had to decide between preserving the past, mistakes and all, and providing an edition that would provide a better reading experience. At first the choices were made piecemeal, as they arose, but as the decisions piled up, it became clear that we wanted to sell a definitive, but edited version. We decided to make minor corrections to the text silently.

After that, the editing process fell into place. Words that were capitalized that wouldn’t be today were retained, but we removed the spaces before semi-colons and question and exclamation marks. Long blocks of text were broken into paragraphs as a concession to the reader’s eyes.

Then there were questions of fact. Palmer’s hired man was spelled Bate here but Bates in other books. I used Bates. Walter Palmer’s bottle-holder responsible for keeping him from drink is known elsewhere as Walkenden, so that is the case here.

Research for the annotations was conducted online and with the help of Denise Phillips at the Hershey Public Library. Her energetic tracking down of sources helped immeasurably.

The illustrations were cleaned up as best they could be. Some from The Times Report of the Trial of William Palmer were moved here, where they could illustrate scenes mentioned in the text.

The Value of a Pound

Converting a pound in 1856 to today that would have any meaning is difficult. There’s inflation and deflation to consider. Some products, such as computers, modern drugs, and digital watches, didn’t exist in 1856. Lower energy prices and international trade have dramatically changed the value of goods such as clothing and out-of-season produce. The factors that go into setting wages have changed as well. Today’s business owners must take into account taxes, pensions, insurance, and other costs that were not considered in Palmer’s time. There were also marked differences in wages paid to skilled workers, semi-skilled workers, and laborers.

The Measuring Worth website (www.measuringworth.com) offers several methods of determining the true value of a pound. They show that the relative value of an 1856 pound ranges from £82 (how much that pound would buy today) to £2,060 (the economic power of that pound when compared to the gross domestic product). Since we want to know how valuable that pound would be to us, we’ll use the historic standard of living measurement, in which a pound then would be worth £82 or $134, rounded off, as of Sept. 3, 2014 (when £1 is worth $1.64). That was the value we used in the Trial volume.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Before I go, I’d like to make a personal request. If you like this book, tell your friends. Mention it on your social network or the website where you bought this book. If you like, email me at [e-mail] or write to the Press at P.O. Box 132, Hershey, PA 17033-0132. Tell me I’m not alone in thinking annotations and extras helped you enjoy the book.

Word of mouth spurs sales, helps me support my family and encourages me to publish more annotations.

Dedication

To Teresa, for not getting any ideas after proofing these books.

Image No. 3

Liverpool, Staffordshire and Rugeley in Palmer’s time.

Image No. 4

Liverpool and Rugeley in Relation to London.

Preface.

William Palmer, the Poisoner, has passed by a terrible and opprobrious death to the bar of a more awful tribunal, and to the presence of a mightier audience than that before which he publicly stood for so many days in London.

For what other deeds he has to be there arraigned we shall never know in this world. Enough, however, has been proved, to the satisfaction of all thinking minds, to consign him to a doom which could not have been aggravated on earth had everything of which he was guilty been adduced. It is no subtle or recondite moral that his fate inculcates. More than once of late years, he has had large sums of money in his possession, and yet, from the moment of his first frauds, he never regained a chance of independence or of solvency; since the same epoch, he endeavoured to parry immediate and pressing dangers, by incurring progressively higher and worse risks, which were not to be so instantaneously encountered, but which were inevitable in their own time—until, from the fraud of a bill which there was no rational prospect of meeting when due, he advanced to the deeper fraud of forged acceptances, continually renewed by fresh forgeries; and so, step by step, to the plunder of insurance companies by means of polices made available through the assassination of the insured; and, lastly, to robbery with his own hand at the death-bed of the man whom he had murdered.

Not for one instant, in spite of the enormous amounts for which he laid his schemes, could he see his way towards clearing himself; and not for one instant, despite of a certain superficial popularity among his coarse associates, could he say to himself that he was safe. Had he purchased by that certainty of ruin, more or less speedy, in which he involved his affairs, and by those still more terrible and more fatal uncertainties with which he begirt the duration of his existence, as well as the mode of its close—had he thus purchased some of the most exquisite delights and the chief enjoyments of which man is susceptible, the cost would still have been insensate.

But—having started with fair opportunities and ample means—it was for the sake of that hideous and dark career to which we have alluded—it was for the sake of that life of forlorn makeshifts, of mysterious expedients, of unintermitted alarm, struggle, and anxiety—for the sake of this wretched, troublous, crazed, hurrying, and desperate existence, that he chose to bring himself at the age of thirty-two, or very little more, to the terrible and ignominious death which he publicly underwent on the gallows in front of Stafford gaol.

The moral is trite and obvious. It is not on every nature that the influences which led Palmer to destruction would have proved so malign: but they were not the less evil in themselves, and they are not the less a danger. The unbridled impatience to grow rich quickly, the excitement of a gambling life and the ever deepening debasement of unprincipled companionship, will produce their natural fruit in a great many characters who might otherwise have remained innocent of at least the more dreadful forms of crime.

As to the guilt of the wretched man, the certainty of it is such as may safely set the public conscience at rest. It is true, the proofs in this case were exclusively circumstantial. But we would remind all who may not have accurately reflected on this interesting subject, that no proofs can possibly be so satisfactory as those derived from circumstantial evidence, where the chain of that evidence is really complete. And why? Because, however trustworthy witnesses may be, they still are liable, when deposing to the fact itself at issue, itself controverted (instead of to a multiplicity of seemingly minor circumstances)—however trustworthy witnesses may be, they are liable to be swayed by a thousand feelings—by pity, terror, hope, fear, by likes and dislikes;—whereas circumstances have neither likes nor dislikes, no passions, no emotions, no interests to warp their testimony or cloud their judgment. It may be said that it is living witnesses, after all, who depose to those circumstances themselves. True; but so far as each is severally concerned, these circumstances do not appear necessarily connected with the actual deed, or with its disturbing spectacle. No one individual circumstance would of itself convict the accused; it is the chain of them which involve him, and that chain is formed out of the depositions of a multitude of different persons, who not only could not possibly have concerted such a mutually explaining body of proofs, but who are many of them strangers to each other, and are, like all numerous masses of individuals, actuated by various interests, objects, and passions. The obvious impossibility of jointly inventing this complete plot of inferential proof—an impossibility inherent in the very nature of circumstantial evidence—where every fact would be indifferent only for its perfect concordance with every other fact, and where each of these facts is attested by a distinct witness unconnected, and often unacquainted, with his fellow deponents; this impossibility constitutes the superior strength of circumstantial evidence, in comparison with that direct testimony about the main issue itself, which testimony can be, and too often is, suborned on either side.

Image No. 5

CHAPTER I.

PALMER’S ANCESTORS—THE FOUNDER OF THE PALMER FAMILY—HIS WIDOW AND HER REPUTED LOVERS.

I

F THE LIVES of the great and good are deserving of being written for the admiration of succeeding generations, and to excite those who study them to the practice of brave and virtuous actions, the careers of great criminals are equally worthy of being recorded, that their misdeeds may become the abhorrence of posterity, and that all who ponder over their wretched courses may take warning by the rapid progress with which, after the first false step, they too surely enter upon their downward path of crime.

Among this class of lives, few are so pregnant with warning as that of the man whose name has hung incessantly on the lips of people of all classes and conditions, for weeks—nay, for months past; the long catalogue of whose victims, as one fresh case after another emerged into the light, sent a thrill of indignant horror throughout the land; and whose conviction has calmed that just apprehension which existed in the minds of all thoughtful men, with regard to the security of life in this country, against the insidious arts of the skilled secret poisoner. Need we say that we allude to the notorious William Palmer, of Rugeley.

This wretched man seems to have sprung from a bad stock, for it is currently reported throughout the midland counties that old Bentley, William Palmer’s grandfather, by the mother’s side, was a kind of bully to a woman who kept a brothel in a back street in Derby. She is represented as being an ignorant woman of somewhat faded attractions, who, with an eye to the main chance, was continually sending Bentley (then a young man) with money to the bank. But Bentley, who had also an eye to the main chance, put it in his own name, and thus, in the course of a few years, contrived to amass a large sum of money. In the meanwhile, Bentley had not been true to the dubious attractions of his mistress, and as she had a very foul tongue and a rather heavy hand. In the course of mutual explanations they fell to blows, the consequences of which were that he drew out his money (as he now called it) from the bank to the alarm and consternation of Miss Margaret Taff, or, as she was more familiarly styled, Pegg Taff, of Mickleover. At her threats of prosecution he merely laughed, like a pleasant man as he was; and in the end, or rather in the very night following, he decamped, taking with him the spoil which amounted in round numbers to £560.

With this sum we find Mr. Bentley turning up at Longway House, near Lichfield with a wife and a daughter; the wife, a lady of whose antecedents nothing is known, except that she was a Mrs. Sharrod; the daughter, the present Mrs. Palmer, sen., who it is reported used to visit Lichfield market with poultry, butter, and eggs, the produce of the farm which her father occupied. From Longway House the family removed to Cleat Hill, and thence to Ashton Hays in the parish of Kings Bromley. Mr. Bentley, by the judicious use which he had made of Pegg Taff’s round hundreds, was now to all appearances a respectable man, well to do in the world. In this position we will leave him to say a few words about his son-in-law, the father of the present Palmer generation.

Bentley’s daughter was a prudent young lady, who thought it not amiss to have a couple of strings to her bow. She was courted by Mr. Hodson, the Marquis of Anglesey’s steward, and by a young sawyer of the name of Palmer. The sawyer, whom everybody speaks of as a coarse, vulgar fellow, fancying that the Marquis’s steward was almost fond enough of Sarah Bentley to marry her, saved him the trouble by marrying her himself. Mr. Hodson is said to have proved none the less fond of Sarah Palmer than he had been of Sarah Bentley; and while he was paying his court to her, her husband was quietly marking the Marquis of Anglesey’s timber, which is a very innocent practice in itself, but when by marking them 1,1; 2, 2; 3, 3; instead of 1, 2, 3, Palmer could get six at the price of three, or better still, ten at the price of one, for we were informed by an old man who carted timber for old Palmer, that he had seen ten No. tens come in one day from Stroughborough Park—you can imagine that, even after going snags with the steward Hodson, he still was in a fair way to make his fortune.

He evidently thought so, for he took extensive premises at Rugeley, built a fine house, began to keep servants, and, in fact, accumulated money. Then he fell in with the steward of the Bagot estate, with whom he was also in the habit of going snags, and these sums of compound addition were worked out again with similar results.

Finally, he fell in with the lease of the East Collieries at Brereton and might now be considered a rich and prosperous gentleman.

But one day this rich and prosperous gentleman came in from his timber-yard to dinner; he ate heartily, seemed to be quite well, and to be enjoying himself. He was just finishing his dinner when he fell back with his bread and cheese clutched in his hand—dead, without a word.

This happened, we believe, in 1837. The will which old Palmer left behind him was unsigned, and it is understood that Joseph, the eldest son, who would have taken all the freehold property in his own right, executed a deed to the effect that he and his brothers should have £7,000 each, and that the old lady should have the remainder, and the landed property, for her lifetime; she, however, engaging not to marry.

Mrs. Palmer’s solicitor repeatedly told Joseph that he would repent it some day, and in fact refused to have the deed executed by which Joseph dispossessed himself of so much property unless another solicitor was called in. Joseph then had his own solicitor, and for some time had thoughts of backing out, but eventually he signed the deed.

The body of the old man was laid in Rugeley church yard, and a tomb erected above his grave. He had risen to wealth and respectability, and deserved, according to the notions of his heirs, to have a Grecian tomb placed over his dust and ashes, with iron rails to keep off the curious intruder. A man that leaves £70,000 behind him deserves something better than a grass mound to mark his last resting-place. He sprang from nothing, but he mustn’t end so. He must be made a good deal of.

Image No. 7

Palmer Family Vault in Rugeley Churchyard.

On the stone slab above the tomb—that kind of death’s visitor’s-book, where all who enter have their names written down,—is inscribed, in deeply-cut letters that will bear much wear and tear before they are worn away, In a vault beneath are interred the remains of Joseph Palmer, together with his age, and the date of his death.

The sawyer’s widow, in course of time, consoled herself for the loss of her spouse by other attachments. One of her favoured swains was a strapping linendraper, named Duffy; and at the Shoulder of Mutton public-house, in the Market-place of Rugeley, and close to the Town Hall, there could be seen, until recently seized by the police, the love-letters which the youthful, fascinating, and unfortunate Duffy is said to have received from the aged, giddy, and wealthy Mrs. Palmer.

Image No. 8

The Shoulder of Mutton Inn, Rugeley.

The Shoulder of Mutton is a cottage with a tall roof, from which the bedroom windows look out upon the street. Over the entrance-door is the painting of an immense shoulder of mutton, only to be matched by the enormous dried hams showing through the passage window. In the front portion of the premises, the shelves are ornamented with sample-bottles of wines and spirits, which at the first glance have the appearance of medicine bottles. There is also a plaster cast of a cow, although no milk is to be purchased on the premises; and, unless the image should refer to cream of the valley, it is totally out of place, and without meaning.

The taproom looks as if it had lately been added to the other portions of the house, for it has a small slate roof of its own, and is glazed with heavy white sashes and small panes of glass, twelve to the square yard, and is entirely out of character with the remainder of the building.

Thomas Clewley, the landlord, is a fine-looking man, with white hair and a cherry-red face, that puts one in mind of "trifle" at an evening party. The statement he makes to his customers, respecting Duffy and Mrs. Palmer, senior, is as follows:—

"There was a strapping chap of the name of Duffy—a good-looking fellow—who used to come to lodge with me. He was rather a dull chap in the house, and he’d sit still and drink. He did not run up a very big shot. The first time he came here, Mr. William Palmer paid for him. The second time he came, Mr. William Palmer told me he wouldn’t pay, so I gave Duffy the bill, but he did not pay me then; he said he should have some money coming in a day or two. Soon after, he went out of the house without saying anything, and I never set eyes on him again. We gave him three or four years for coming back again; but as he didn’t come, and his boxes began to smell very bad, my missus opened them—there was only a lot of dirty shirts and things. He hadn’t no clothing only what he had on his back. In the trunks I found some letters, not put by with any care, as if they were particular valuable, but just careless. They were only courting letters, and were from Mrs. Palmer (the old lady), written to him. I should think Duffy was about forty years old, and Mrs. Palmer was from about fifty-five to sixty. She has sons now as is above forty. I think Duffy was in the linendrapery line. I never paid no more attention to him than that he was a traveller. The police has been here, and got Duffy’s traps.

"The letters finished off with loving and kissing. They made appointments to meet at a many different places; but I was in no way interested in their loves, and I never troubled my head about it; it was the women as exposed the whole business—nobody would have seen ’em or known anything about the letters if it had not been for